A governance standard for autonomous penetration testing platforms. It defines what these systems must do to operate safely, transparently, and within defined boundaries, whether they are delivered by vendors, operated as a service, or built in-house by enterprise security teams for testing their own organization.
APTS is not a testing methodology. It complements PTES, OWASP WSTG, and OSSTMM by addressing the problems unique to autonomous operation: scope enforcement, safe autonomy, manipulation resistance, and accountability.
| Domain | Prefix | Requirements | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope Enforcement | SE | 26 | Defining, validating, and enforcing testing boundaries |
| Safety Controls | SC | 20 | Impact classification, blast radius, kill switches, rollback, execution sandbox |
| Human Oversight | HO | 19 | Approval gates, dashboards, escalation, operator qualifications |
| Graduated Autonomy | AL | 28 | Four autonomy levels (L1 Assisted through L4 Autonomous) |
| Auditability | AR | 20 | Logging, decision trails, evidence integrity, audit trail isolation |
| Manipulation Resistance | MR | 23 | Prompt injection, adversarial inputs, scope widening defense |
| Supply Chain Trust | TP | 22 | AI provider trust, data handling, multi-tenancy isolation, foundation model disclosure |
| Reporting | RP | 15 | Finding validation, confidence scoring, coverage disclosure |
- Tier 1 (Foundation): 72 requirements. The platform will not test outside scope, can be stopped immediately, and provides an audit trail.
- Tier 2 (Verified): 85 additional (157 cumulative). Full transparency, tamper-proof audit trails, and independently verifiable findings.
- Tier 3 (Comprehensive): 16 additional (173 cumulative). Highest assurance for critical infrastructure and L4 autonomous operations.
Ten additional advisory practices live exclusively in the Advisory Requirements appendix under the APTS-<DOMAIN>-A0x identifier pattern. Advisory practices are not counted toward any tier and do not affect conformance.
APTS has no certification body, no mandatory third-party audit, and no fee. Platforms are assessed against the requirements and conformance is documented. The standard does not prescribe who performs the assessment; internal self-assessment, independent internal review, and external third-party assessment are all valid approaches, and the choice is left to the reader.
Requirements use the format APTS-XX-NNN where XX is the domain prefix and NNN is the requirement number (for example, APTS-SE-001). For versioned references in contracts or evaluations, use APTS-v0.1.0-SE-001.
| If you are... | Start here |
|---|---|
| New to APTS and want to understand the standard | Introduction |
| A vendor or service provider building an autonomous pentest platform | Checklists for your target tier then the domain READMEs |
| An enterprise security team building or operating an internal autonomous pentest platform | Checklists for your target tier then the domain READMEs, then the Conformance Claim Template to document conformance for your downstream customers |
| A CISO or procurement lead evaluating an external vendor or an internal platform | Vendor Evaluation Guide |
| A security professional reviewing a platform | Getting Started then the domain READMEs relevant to your review |
| A contributor looking to improve the standard | CONTRIBUTING.md |
The full standard with all requirements, verification procedures, checklists, and appendices is in the standard/ folder.
This standard is open for community contributions. Whether it is improving requirement clarity, adding implementation examples, fixing errors, or translating the standard, all contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md to get started and GOVERNANCE.md for project roles and decision-making. Translations are maintained in standard/translations/.
Report sensitive content issues (incorrect security guidance, documentation of insecure patterns) via SECURITY.md.
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